The r***it neovim community is fab and taking part in the go-dark outage protest. I think open source communities are better served by open not for profit, decentralized community-apps like this. The corporaate ones always go bad in the end. Reddit and Github both allowed their data to feed the big tech power grab that is LLMs.
I grew up with the phpforum model as well. It worked well, but I recall that there were reasons why it didn’t continue. I think spam was one issue, but there are still a number of successful forum boards.
When it comes to forums, who would be hosting them? My understanding is that the advantage of lemmy is that it is hosted on a distributed level.